On 21 June delegations and repres entatives from various European countries will be marching on the London demonstration against the James White Abortion (Amendment) Bill. One of the speakers on the demonstration will be a woman arrested by the Italian police when they closed down the Abortion and Sterilisation Centre in Florence.
A series of back-up actions have been arranged across Europe to coincide with the 21 June demonstration. These will include pickets in Italy by the Free Abortion Campaign outside British consulates and embassies in Bologna, Turin, Pisa and Florence. In Munich, Germany, a demonstration has been called for Friday 20 June - to ensure that it takes place while the British Consulate is open. A delegation from the French Movement pour la Liberte de l'Avortement et de la Contraception (MLAC), will also be on the 21 June demonstration.
A national conference is being held on 21 June in Switzerland -which means that the Swiss will not be on the London demonstration. However, pro-abortion groups in Switzerland have notified the National Abortion Campaign that they have sent a letter to the Social Services Minister, Barbara Castle, protesting against restrictive measures on abortion. They will also put a resolution at their own conference supporting the 21 June demonstration; and there will be a picket of the British consulate in Lugano.
The Swiss conference will be discussing how to take forward the fight for abortion on demand. Although 50,000 signatures were collected in 1971 calling for a referendum to take abortion off the criminal law books, changes in the law left the decision in the hands of the doctors. Where Swiss cantons are heavily dominated by Catholicism, the law is interpreted in a very restrictive way. If the doctor gives the go-ahead at all, the clause about danger to the 'health' of a woman - the grounds on which abortion will be granted - is interpreted as referring only to 'medical' health.
This has led to 50,000 back street abortions a year being performed in Switzerland - with all the dreadful consequences such as sterility, infections from desperate methods used like knitting needles, soap etc., often even resulting in the woman's death.
At an international meeting on abortion in Paris organised by MLAC on 28 April this year a call was made for actions to be held in Portugal and Italy in the summer and autumn.
In the summer, a week of action has been proposed in Portugal. This will include workshops, films, theatre groups, and the distribution of literature from different countries. This event will be important in exchanging the experiences of gains - and mistakes countries. It will also give a stimulus to the tight against women's oppression in Portugal.
The women's liberation movement is very small in Portugal. old abortion laws have not yet been repealed, and a newly-formed campaign for abortion and contraception facilities has called for the release of all those imprisoned under old laws.
The effects of the revolutionary upsurge have had some effect on making abortions more available. Clinics and hospitals have been set up in buildings taken over by the people. Up to now these have been ignored by the authorities, but they could come under attack if support for contraception and abortion is not built up in the working class movement.
A second international demonstration is also being organised in Italy in the autumn. abortion a crime against the entire race - appeared in January this have waged a battle to seal the crack. have the abortion and sterilisation centres set up by the Radical Party closed.
CAMPAIGN'
- organised to fight against moves to return to une old abortion laws, and against the present restrictions, resulting in death to the woman -will be given a big boost by a massive demonstration in Italy. Plans are being discussed for holding an international conference after the achieved in France by MLAC, its participation in the London and Italian demonstrations is crucial.
have been introauced in France, cuts in hospital expenditure and to some spectacular actions.
entire hospital ward for one afterThis reactionary hospital was then forced to give the demonstrators a guarantee that two abortions a day would be performed under the new law in future.
ng will be held in London of delegates from the various countries actions. The Italian action in particular could and should be used as a means of starting a debate in the made in different international workers' movement not only on abortion, which is significant in itself, but also on how Socialist States of Europe'.
BUILD SUPPORT should be got from every possible Labour Party, trades council, womens group and every Working Women's Charter Group. be to get a really big delegation from Britain.
Portuguese week of action, and the Italian demonstration can not only extend the fight internationally on the issues of abortion and contraception, but against all the attacks which the ruling class is increasingly beginning to co-ordinate on an international scale against the workers' The first crack in the old fascist laws - which make year. Since then reactionary forces The fascists have fought to FREE ABORTION The new Free Abortion Campaign bia.
where three million illegal abortions are performed each year with 3,000 In view of the important victories Although more liberal abortion laws the refusal of the medical profession to implement the new laws have led riot.
Forces from MLAC occupied ar noon and performed abortions using the relatively simple Karmen Method.
The day after the London demonstration, Sunday 22 June, a meetto discuss the Portuguese and Italian to make real the slogan for a United Support for this demonstration The aim should The 21 June demonstration, the oeuvres The shooting down of 13 unarmed African nationalists by the Rhodesian police in Salisbury on 1 June cannot be understood in isolation but only in the light of the whole southern African system of power. The so-called rioting which the bourgeois press claims prompted the racist police to open fire can only be understood as an expression of frustration and incite Of course there are political and factional differences within the suppor sedly re-constituted African National Council (ANC). Of course there are personality clashes in the National Executive of the ANC. The chances of a genuine reconciliation of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) led by the Rev. Ndabaningi Sithole, and the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), led by Joshua Nkomo, are very slim indeed. But these alone cannot explain the so-called rioting and the behaviour of the 'exem plary' police force of the Smith regime.
Throughout the history of African nationalist organisations in the coun try, the Rhodesian racist regime has never failed to exploit the contradictions of these organisations and any other contradictions among the people to ban their organisations. 'Bloody Sunday' can be seen as a calculated attempt to discredit the ANC at this crucial stage of the reactionary 'detente' exercise - the brainchild of the South African Prime Minister, Mr John B. Vorster and to a lesser extent, President Kenneth Kaunda of ZamThe urban African, more than his rural counterpart, is an extsemely frustrated person. The more fortunate ones, who have actually obtained employment, are overworked, underpaid, and denied the most elementary bourgeois civil rights such as the vote and the right to organise in unions. But for many, chronic unemployment - especially of the school-leavers who are forced to leave school due to the lack of opportunities for further education - has become part of the natural order of things.
UNORGANIZED VIOLENCE
This cumulative frustration tends to express itself in senseless unorgan ised violence such as rioting. The violence of African migrant labourers ir the South African gold mines, which is often explained in terms of tribalism, is similarly a result of the alienation and the artificiality of the con dition of life to which they are subjected. Less apparently, this frustration also makes the African population a rich recruiting ground for agents pro vocateurs and informers, elements responsible for inciting the people to We should note that the Smith regime wishes to sabotage the southern African detente exercise, to which it is a very reluctant party. The armea liberation struggle in Zimbabwe, led by the military wing of ZANU, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), has been fast dev eloping along the now classical lines of the Guinean (Bissau) and Mozambique revolutions.
Africa south of the Sahara, realised that his country's military presence in Zimbabwe - in the form of the 'para-military police' - could not halt this dynamic, just as his intervention in Mozambique delayed but finally failed to defeat the revolution. triumphed in Zimbabwe, South Africa itself would be the next item on the agenda of the African Revolution This fear has already been justified by the enthusiasm with which the Blacks in South Africa welcomed the victory of the people of Mozambiqu under the leadership of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO). Of special significance was the response of the people of Soweto, to which the racist state reacted with its usual extreme violence.
It is therefore absolutely necessary for the survival of apartheid in Soutl Africa that the national liberation movement in Zimbabwe does not get out of hand. The recent attempts to disarm ZAPU, ZANU and the Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe (FROLIZI) under the cover of detente were really aimed at ZANU and its army - the real vanguard in the armed struggle for liberation. This disarmament was not so much the work of Vorster as of Zambian premier Kaunda, who actually forced the leaders of ZANU to sign the Lusaka Agreement last December.
REPRESSION OF ZANU BY KAUNDA The Zambian Government then proceeded to arrest all the ZANU mil itants on the pretext that they wanted to get hold of the murderers of ZANU leader Herbert Chitepo. To be sure, hundreds of men and women had died in factional staggles within ZANU and Chitepo's death was the climax of the murders. The fact is that they provided Kaunda with a very good opportunity to clamp down on and force them into the ANC fold, thus fulfilling his part of the detente exercise with Vorster.
The murderous attack by Smith's police in Salisbury last week was an attempt to take advantage of this crisis of nationalist perspectives to furthe demoralise the resistance. international labour movement to prevent the isolation of the resistance fighters, which is the main aim of the southern Afritan detente manThe Labour Government has given yet more proof of its cynical subservience to imperialist interests in this area with its announcement last Friday that it would veto a United Nations resolution to impose a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa over its occupation of Namibia (South West Africa). The answer of the labour movement must be very clear - to impose its own sanctions both by blacking all arms shipments to the racist regimes and by taking up the call by the South West African People's Organisation to black all goods from Namibia. This, together with financial and other direct assistance to the liberation fighters, can help to frustrate imperialism's latest manoeuvres and boost the struggle Vorster, the stern guardian of capitalism and racism in He also realised that if a people's revolutio This places a particular responsibility on the
The most recent assembly of the Armed Forces Movement, meeting to discuss the nexty threat of a steps forward in Portugal, issued a call to reinforce the direct relations of the AFM with all the structures of popular participation, with a view to consolidating the all lance of the AFM and the people and overcoming partisan divisions in the common struggle of the battle for production and effective construction of socialism.:
But what the statement failed to specify was the relationship between these 'struc tures of popular participation' and the capitalist state - and on which it was intended that the Government should be based. This has led to a situation of continsing polit ical crisis reflecting the ongoing struggle for dominance between capital and labour On the one hand, the Socialist Party, whose leadership is firmly committed to the defence of capitalism, has seized on a dispute at the newspaper Republica to raise a huw and cry about the 'Communist threat' to democracy and to warn against the red weekly cabinet ur SAID look utionary s dom and i popular p tures with Rouge, me below the labour mo
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DOCTORS DECISION